Abstract
This paper uses contemporary South African artist Leora Farber’s visual representation of imagined cultivars and grafting in selected works from the photographic series Aloerosa and Cultivars (2004-2007) to open up interpretative possibilities of post-colonial artist ecologies. The two correlating series Aloerosa and Cultivars (2004-2007) are framed by a visual entanglement of two estranged, imagined life-worlds: that of a Victorian colonial woman Bertha Guttmann and the indigenous South African ecology into which she settled. In the series Aloerosa, Farber as the solo protagonist uses her body and skin as a platform onto which the colonial ecological encounter is literally and metaphorically grafted. The narrative portrays Farber in Victorian attire surrounded by a South African landscape, transplanting indigenous Aloe cultivars into her skin. As the narrative progresses the protagonist’s body is subsumed by the surrounding landscape. The Cultivar series consists of photographic, botanical representations of imagined, hybridised plants with clear traces of typical South African aloe plants and British roses. The images are presented in a historical botanical illustrative fashion, reminiscent of “colonial and indigenous botanical novelties” (Farber, 2012). I consider how the Aloerosa and Cultivars series address socio-ecological and affective tensions between landscape and colonial sovereignty by investigating the domestication, violence and subjugated brought about by colonial territorial histories in South Africa. I focus on the portrayal of indigenous plants and the role they played during colonial processes as the exotic threat in need of taming and simultaneously the use of foreign vegetation as an asset of cultural production.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Aloerosa; Botanical colonialism; Cultivars; Leora Farber; Post-colonial ecology
